Fête des MousquetairesOct 2017 - A Haunted Man
by BootsnHats
Summary: An entry in the Haunted Houses Challenge


_A Haunted Man_

I

She is everywhere. The woman in the market place beneath the elegant drape of a shawl, the female shape bending gracefully to pluck a flower in a meadow, the lady on the swing, her full-throated cry of delight echoing in his ears long after riding past. Deep in the recesses of his frozen heart there remain rivulets of memories that will not dry up.

The merest whiff of violets, still, after five long years, act upon his physical body as though her fingers winnow his hair. His comrades have stopped asking why camping by some shady brook or stream is ignored in favor of dry, dusty bedrolls. They cannot know the nodding blue forget-me-nots crowding the banks of the riverbeds clog his throat and blur his vision because it has never occurred to him to tell them.

Just the wind in his hair conjures his last memories of her. The froth of white dress she chose to wear to her execution, the miniscule bouquet of forget-me-nots dropping from her clasped hands as the rope cut off breath and life, the forgiving love shining from her eyes until opacity obscured vision.

He wears a hat now.

He owes allegiance to the shrine in his heart where she will live forever in his tortured memory. Her bright smile, the wicked grin, the knowing laugh, the scintillating chuckle. The devastating moue that had always appeared just before she let fly some blasphemous, pithy annihilation of character. Lord Pigsty, whose family fortune was of porcine profundity; Lady Charity, Mistress of the Baskets for the Saintly-Poorer-Than-I; Sister Songstress-Tonedeaf directing the parish choir; Pastor Should-be-DeFrocked, Minister to the Lowly who Kneel to do his Bidding; Brother-in-Waiting for the Heir to Die, Thomas.

Youthful infatuation engineered the shrine so tenderly embedded in his heart. No amount of lead, no plunge of sword, no twist of dagger can destroy the ghostly shadow of shame that still, five years on, dogs his failure to root it out.

He is a haunted man.

II

The scales are tipping again, that soul deep need crawling up from his belly to claw at his chest like the gnarled finger-bone of a saintly relic. A desperate desire kindles beneath his breast bone as the keen gaze tracks the hurrying, cossack-and-cowl-clad figures. He feels again the phantom tug of the razor upon his scalp, though the long hair clubbed now at the base of his neck has never been sacrificed.

The abbot, God rest his soul, consistently refused him the final rite of passage that would have secured his standing among the brothers of Douai. The Golden Child had failed, God had not found him worthy of a place in the fold. That barb still quivers in his heart like a stuck stinger sinisterly spreading its poison.

He knows the longing on his face is evident, sees it reflected in the eyes of his true brothers, those he'd walked away from in a effort to keep the vow he made to God in the bowels of the _châtelet._ He sees the hurt too, in their return gazes, but this spirit hunger cannot be sated by an act of contrition upon the steps of the cavernous Notre Dame or the lighting of a candle in the sanctity of Saint Chappelle.

Guilt ghosts his dragging footsteps like a faithful puppy. He could follow, he knows, find a spiritual guide less insightfully gifted than the Abbot of Douai, one that would welcome him into the inner circle with songs of praise and thanksgiving. He is after all, the equal of his brother-in-arms whose name is synonymous with the greatest swordsman in France. He is still a marksman of equal renown, though he laid down his weapons of destruction without regret when God, rather aberrantly through his friends, kept His side of the bargain and saved the queen from that mad man's machinations.

 _"_ We _are not letting him go;_ he _is letting us go."_

He sees the lingering shadows of fear in their eyes ... the knowledge that he might do it again. Turn his back, walk away in order to serve the god whose yoke was so ill-fitting. The chafing has worn his spirit raw, and yet the divine hunger, this burning desire embedded in his soul to self-immolate, is such a driving force it cannot be quenched.

Across Paris, the noonday bells are tolling, gathering the saints of Saint Denis, the souls of Sacre Coeur, the sisters of Saint Sulpice. His boots are rooted into the dirt; he can turn his footsteps, draw up his own cowl, join the faithful whom God has called, leave the world behind once more, follow the whisper of the divine.

Beneath the pillow in his room at the garrison lies a treasured gift, a first edition of John Donne's _Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions._ The little book is over a hundred years old, its pages worn thin with countless hours of reading and absorbing the fading letters and words inked within its heart. _Therefore send not to know For whom the bell tolls,_ _It tolls for thee_.

Not today. He will not try to silence the haunting lyric of the divine, but the bells do not toll for him today. He places his feet carefully in the footprints of his companion and strddes on.

III

His love is a thing unchaste, unholy, but he cannot bring himself to flay it from his soul, though the flagellation of spirit is wearing him thin as a sheet of parchment. His brothers have not remarked, though he is aware of their lingering glances, of the bitten off words, both of exhortation and comfort.

Her husband treats her as a servant, an unpaid, unloved, undesired, unlovely drab whose only purpose in life is to wait upon the coward's every whim. She is pledged to another, his honor is at stake, but he would throw it away in a heartbeat to worship at her shrine.

His only desire is to unleash the writhing spirit suppressed by the weighty hand of ownership, to free her from the bonds of servitude and, if truth be told, matrimony. He broods, lying upon his narrow bed, anger twisting like a pit of snakes in his belly as the shared wall between chambers vibrates to repeated thrusts. He would, if he dared, burn down the warehouse full of cloth, bend the merchant's knee to unkind fate, slice the tether binding the man's soul to this earth.

A slip of the wrist in a duel of prowess. A dagger thrust in a lonely back alley. More satisfactory, a garrote in that moment of shattering fulfillment. He is haunted by the rawness of these unfamiliar thoughts, the insanity of the beckoning darkness opening up in his soul.

Love should be about diamond dew drops and rose petals glistening in the dawn of ancient awareness. Poetry beside sun-dappled, gurgling streams flowing to the endless ocean. Leafy bowers dressed in spring green shading lovers replete in the aftermath of nature's oldest exercise.

This ugly, thrashing of his soul is unbecoming, it stalks the purity of his youthful love. Worse, he knows it is not unrequited, though he sees that she fights this thing between them with every bit courage and tenacity she possesses.

He will not try to bend her to his will as does the spouse, but neither will he quell the admiration in his gaze, the implicit temptation his body flagrantly flaunts. It is beyond his will to rein in these impulses to conquer and claim this territory that belongs to another, though only to set her free to choose. He has no wish to master her, only to partner her, to give her full access to the joy she must steal furtively now.

He would give her lingering touches instead of the fleeting brush of fingers as he passes over the basket he has carried home from the market for her. Slow kisses in place of smoldering glances shared behind her husband's back. The glory of love making rather than a chattel's service to a master.

But he cannot save her against her will.

The crack in his heart widens with every haunting thump of the wall behind his head.

IV

He cannot help himself, though one friend flings off his protection like an unwanted mantle, another plots to slip through the fortifications he would build around the youth, and the third resents his futile attempts to keep him in the fold.

He knows they are not ungrateful, merely intolerant of boundaries and safeguards. It is their fearlessness that haunts him, that drives him to spread his great wings over them, to keep a fierce eye out for predators that would harm the innocence of their confidence. For they are each, in their own way, confident in their own prowess. He alone sees the vulnerable neck, the exposed side, the defenseless knee. It is prideful, he knows, to believe this, but he also knows his hands are weapons, his feet indomitable foes.

His eyes are not clouded by love, or what passes for it, nor blurred by some inner pain that drives him to the bottle. They are far-seeing and ever vigilant. He will guard these precious souls given into his keeping by the One who ordained his birth, with the last breath left in his body.

He is haunted by seditious scenarios stalking his thoughts though: the bloody stump of a headless neck; a long, slow perfidious death from alcohol; riven limbs, spilling entrails, severed heads. He knows he cannot spread his wings far enough to save them from cuckolded spouses, the lure of the bottle, trysting treason, but that does not stop him from making the attempt. It is his role and he fulfills it with a glad and grateful heart.

He is the silent watcher of the foursome, the fortifications the enemy must breach to reach his friends. He is everywhere and omnipresent, for growing up in the Court, he has cultivated eyes and ears in every _quartier_ of the city; no darkened corner, no foul midden is beyond his seeing, no whisper can escape his hearing. He knows there will come a time when his shields will crease and fold, his indomitable will fail, his wings melt. One day he will meet an enemy he cannot overcome on their behalf, he carries a dread of that day, but his nature is optimistic. On that day, he will take as many of the enemy as God grants him down into hell with him.

In the meantime, these are his friends, his comrades, his companions; they are also the yoke that lovingly binds him in this time and place in history. It does not occur to him that he will be immortalized in verse and song, he is merely doing the best job he can do, keeping these brothers of his alive to woo and win and wine and dine another day.

He will always be a haunted man.

* * *

 _This has been a work of transformative fan fiction. The characters and settings in this story are the property of The British Broadcasting Company, its successors and assigns. The story itself is the intellectual property of the author. No copyright infringement has been perpetrated for financial gain._


End file.
